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Basics of Reading Cumulative Flow Diagrams

by | Sep 29, 2011 | Kanban Basics, Kanban Metrics

Note: After reading this post, you may find these posts of interests as well:
“Bottlenecks – Revisiting the Reading of Cumulative Flow Diagrams” dated 11/27/2012
“Are You Just an Average CFD User?” dated 02/21/2014. Also, Dan Vacanti has also captured and expanded in greater detail on much of the topics touched on in this post, in his book titled “ActionableAgile.”

During our Agile Denver Kanban SIG’s September meeting, we revisited the previous month’s discussion on the “basics of reading cumulative flow diagrams.” I captured our initial questions and a brief summary of our discussion a few days later to post on our SIG’s LinkedIn site. However, I felt there was a bit more “food for thought” from our discussion to capture.

This post is the “expanded summary” inspired by our past two recent SIG meetings. If you’re relatively new to CFDs and still find the basics of reading them a bit puzzling, I hope these questions and the “walk-through style” responses help clear up a few things. If you see something that “smells” wrong or have an interesting insight, let me know that too!

First Things First!

If you’re completely new to CFDs, here are two links we used to “kick-off” our SIG’s discussions.

The first link is to a Slideshare post by Zsolt Fabok, on the basics of kanban. Check out slide 27 in particular though for a high-level visual and description of a CFD first.

The second link is to a blog post by Håkan Forss, where he does a great job showing step-by-step how to create a simple CFD using MS-Excel. This should help you get started creating your own but more importantly, even if you don’t create your own going forward, seeing and understanding the basic mechanics of creating one should help your understanding of them.

Wait, one quick question first, what is lead time, and what is cycle time, and how do they differ?

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Finally, My First Post, Almost!

by | Aug 17, 2011 | Miscellaneous

For several years I’ve visited other’s blogsites and read their posts on various topics. There are several I visit often because of the beneficial material and learning I’ve found there. A few are related to my personal interests, such as physical fitness, turkey hunting, fresh-water fishing, and drumming, but most I visit are related to software development. In particular, ones related to applying lean-agile principles, the kanban software development method, and XP practices but also those related to using domain-driven design, pattern-oriented software architectures, and object-oriented design.

After seeing how others were using blog sites to capture and share their learning, thoughts, questions, and reflections on these topics, in the last couple of years, I too began giving serious consideration to creating my own. My “seriousness” began by creating a folder on my computer hard disk to collect ideas, mostly from threads of responses and replies from emails, discussion groups, and other blogsites, that I had found interesting and felt would be great “blog seed” material for me in the near future. I had established a domain name years ago as part of being self-employed in the past and had maintained it. Last year, when renewing this registration, my “seriousness” for creating my own blog site went to the next level with a “five year” discounted hosting package.

But it has only been in the last couple of weeks, I took the next “real” steps and built my initial blog site pages and now with this first “practice” post I am “Oh, so close to my first official post.” What “pulled” me over the top? (more…)